occasionally bombarding the headquarters in an irregular manner

March 31, 2014

I said downpage that I wasn't sure the students occupying the Taiwanese legislature could get the numbers on the street to support their action. Looks like they can:

More than 100,000 Taiwanese marched in Taipei to protest a trade deal with China, challenging President Ma Ying-jeou’s plan to improve economic relations between the political rivals.

The 100,000 is the police figure. If we split the difference between that and the organisers' figure we get maybe a quarter of a million, which is a) genuinely impressive and b) makes it specifically the mosty successful Occupy type movement we've seen yet. They may not have got what they want, yet, but they've got a fair proportion of the population mobilized behind getting it.

One question is what China would do if the Occupiers succeeded in their demand to derail the services treaty between China and Taiwan.

Hu Jintao's policy was basically strategic patience. He reined in the PLA with a committment that China would invade if Taiwan actually declared independence ( the previous policy was that China would invade at any time it felt like doing so), waited out the DPP administration and then let Ma and the KMT move towards China at their own pace and in negotiation with the Taiwanese electorate. Indeed it offered certain inducements to make that easier. The agreement under dispute, for instance, opens up more of the mainland economy to Taiwanese business than vice versa and the difference can be seen as a kind of downpayment on the support of the local business classes for gradual economic merger.

Now that this policy may have reached at least a temporary high water mark, we'll have to see if Xi's more diplomatically aggressive regime decides to take a different tack. This would probably be ill-advised, given that Beijing's main medium term goal in Taiwan has to be the re-election of the KMT under a different but presumably just as friendly president in 2016.

March 28, 2014

The Maoist Internationalist Movement is now defunct, but has done the broad masses the incalculable favour of putting all its film reviews online. Here, the comrades consider the virtues or otherwise of Rogers and Hammerstein's South Pacific:

The danger of this latter result is greater in this film than in films of stark heroes and villains
often seen in Chinese socialist realism led by Jiang Qing. For example, the Navy nurse is attractive,
athletic, talented on stage as a dancer and singer; has men following her around giving her favors;
seems friendly and calls herself a "cock-eyed optimist." These aspects of her character may overwhelm
backward audiences...

March 26, 2014

In the late nineteenth century, colonial medico-legal scholars adopted these questions, taking the indigenous spleen as the object of their research. Theyconcentrated on Bengal and Assam, where many residents suffered enlargedspleens from repeated bouts of malarial fever. Because these regions were also ﬂashpoints of interracial violence and nationalist agitation, medicalevaluations of the Indian spleen were deeply relevant to criminal jurispru-dence. Studies of the Indian spleen, which generated ﬁerce reactions fromthe Indian nationalist press, had an unpredictable impact on homicide trials.At ﬁrst, these studies seemed to serve the prosecutorial interest. But ulti-mately, the colonial judiciary deployed this brand of medico-legal scholarshipin order to mitigate British violence in India. Through the investigation of theIndian spleen, the British boot was rendered something less than murderous.

The prose can be a bit turgid at times but there's some quite remarkable stuff here about the circumstances in which it was acceptable or otherwise for the British to assault Indians up to and including the point of death during the Raj. The quote reminds me of Orwell's remark citing a 19th century British judge to the effect that the characteristic crime of the Englishman was 'kicking yoiur wife to death'.

March 25, 2014

A week ago a bunch of Taiwanese students with no connection to any of the established local political parties surprised everyone by bursting into the Legislative Yuan, the Taiwanese Parliament, and barricading themselves in. They're still there. Emboldened by this coup – I mean coup in the colloquial sense of the word - they tried to top it over the weekend by occupying the presidential offices, from which they were promptly evicted. They're now hunkered back down in the parliament, supported by several thousand people on the surrounding streets.

The proximate cause of the occupation is an agreement on trade in services that the KMT government of Ma Ying-jeou decided to hustle through the legislature. There are complaints on the Taiwanese side that this will actually weaken the local economy. But what the students are really occupying here is the Giant Sucking Sound from the mainland, which has got ever louder since the Ma administration was first elected and began signing an accelerating round of trade agreements with the PRC.

In fairness to Ma, this is more or less what he was elected to do. However, Taiwanese politics is at least partly a kind of balancing act between trying not to do anything too provocative on the one hand and trying to preserve the island's autonomy on the other. The student protest may indicate that the latest agreement is a deal too far. Most polls say that the public is broadly supportive of the points the students are making, which is not the same thing as the level of support for the occupation itself. While their action was audaciously conceived and brilliantly executed, the students don't seem to have sufficient numbers of people ready to come out on the streets to support them to change the mind of the administration, which remains intransigent. There is a possibility that it might become a longer term inflection point in overall Taiwanese politics, though that may depend on how the occupation eventually ends or is ended.

March 21, 2014

In this informative article I discover that a fellow called Bashar al-Zoubi is a 'former travel agent turned rebel commander'. Wondering idly what kind of people 'turn rebel commander' these days I did a quick google. They include tailors, footballers, artillery colonels, interior ministers, businessmen (business not specified), Islamist preachers, altar boys, engineers, factory workers, civil servants, car mechanics, and, representing the intelligentsia, university professors.

The world being as it is, 'rebel commander' is a bloke-ish trade so it's no surprise to see a lot of 'masculine' occupations in there. It's interesting how many of them are straightforwardly blue collar - the old revolution as social mobility thing still seems to apply. There don't seem to be any of those underemployed lawyers and kindred graduates that are supposed to be overproduced prior to the downfall of developmental dictatorships. And no-one at all from the fashionable trades, including IT.

March 20, 2014

Extraordinary measures were taken at the summit to preserve confidentiality, signaling the sensitivity of the debate among 28 national leaders. The president of the European Council, Herman van Rompuy, chairing the summit, barred all aides and advisers to the government chiefs from Thursday evening’s dinner and insisted no mobile phones or other electronic devices be allowed. There was no known precedent for such measures in the history of EU summitry, diplomats said.

Security theatre sure, but also a sense of, well, nervousness. There's something personal in the sanctions announced today, a direct assault on the finances of Putin and the Russian overclass, a financial end run around Putin's machismo. That's fine when you're dealing with a global no-mark like Mugabe, but maybe a different matter here. If Russia doesn't have the capacity to attack the personal fortunes of Western politicans in the same way, there are surely plenty of things it could reveal about Russian dealings with our political classes that they would rather not have publicised. It may in fact be the best way they have at striking back, given that they need to sell the gas just as much as we need to buy it. Is there a record, for instance, of what George Osborne said to Mr Deripaska way back when aboard Mr Deripaska's yacht that time when he was asking for money for the Tories? What do Putin's people know about the connections between their overclass and ours? Let the kompromat wars begin.

March 19, 2014

The Sino-Indian border conflcit of 1962 was the last war China won and the second last it fought (not counting border skirmishes with the Soviet Union in the late sixties). The PLA performed well in 1962, though personally I'm more impressed by the second part of the record.

Anyway, here's a leak of the still formally top secret Henderson Brooks - Bhagat report produced for the Indian government after the debacle. Says the Diplomat:

the Indian government’s forward policy provoked China into using force against India — something that Nehru and other Indian leaders did not anticipate due to their reliance on outdated intelligence leading up to the start of the conflict.

Perhaps relatedly, maybe it would have been better to have read Sun Tzu before rather than after...

March 18, 2014

OK folks, here's some interesting speculation on how a Ukraine scenario would play out in Taiwan, on the assumption that the US will feel the need to directly confront China over matters of East Asian primacy in the near future:

With the precedent of Ukraine, let's say that Ma Ying-jeou and the KMT decide to insulate Taiwan-mainland relations from the possibility of a KMT defeat in the 2016 polls and accelerate the development of cross-strait ties. This shall not stand! Declares the hard-core independence militants. Crowds appear before the presidential palace and refuse to disperse until their demands-maybe for reduction of cross-strait ties, maybe for a new unity government, maybe for a referendum on independence-are met. In Chen Shuibian, currently about halfway through a twenty-year sentence for corruption, there is even an imprisoned leader whose release could be demanded. Things get violent as the government, with its approvals hovering near single digits, encounters angry defiance as it tries to put an end to the crisis.

Taiwanese yearning for democracy and freedom outside the baleful shadow of communist China becomes a cause celebre. NGOs, politicians, celebrities, journalists, and money from the West and Japan come in. Japan, in particular, remembers its locally very popular history as the colonial ruler of Taiwan from 1895 until 1945, and offers moral and tangible support to the markedly pro-Japanese and anti-PRC elements in the Democratic People's Party.

I think the basic problem with this is that Ukraine is de jure independent and that most Ukranians want it that way: Taiwanese seem to be more content to preserve the status quo of de facto independence to the extent that the DPP as a whole has trimmed on their commitment to full independence in order to become electable, though the radical end of the pan-Green spectrum remains committed to this goal. There's too much dog here for the tail to wag.

On the other hand, there is a current of ardent pro-Japanese thinking in Taiwanese politics, so if the Sino-Japanese cold war develops, this would be the kind of conflict at the periphery scenario we might expect. But the question there would be whether the Japanese tail could wag the American dog.

March 14, 2014

I once asked my mum why she disliked Tony Benn, since their politics were so similar. She said it was more that she didn't trust him. I sort of know what she meant. His life appeared to be a series of happenings without much connection. The spitfire pilot. The go-ahead technocrat and arch Labour moderniser. The man who cast aside the trappings of aristocracy for the mantle of the diggers. The socialist insurgent. The wandering prophet, very much appreciated in his own church halls and community centres. It looked from the outside like a bundle of random identities and sometimes it made him seem like a high-minded neo-Victorian version of Timothy Leary, with tea instead of acid. There's also a latent 'Ballardian version' of his life: the rogue pilot with a vision for humanity. Set the controls for the heart of the sun.

Look at it harder and it begins to make sense. It's absolutely in line with a certain strand of modern British history that an ex-RAF officer should take an enthusiasm for technology into government. And while it might be unusual that someone should be turned from being 'on the right of the middle of the road' into a socialist by his experience as a Labour minister, it's certainly not in any way bonkers. It is in fact entirely logical if you start from the point that humanity will embed socialism through the enlightened application of technological change and then try and manage the process within the existing economic system – assuming the Socialism bit remains important to you. And while, to my mind, old Tony wasn't the most appealing spokesman for a combination of political libertarianism and hard socialist economics, I didn't notice anyone else with anywhere near his prominence putting that view forward. Which is a shame, because Bread and Roses, in some combination, is what the left should generally be after.

Counterfactual: If Benn's politics had stayed as they were in the fifties and sixties, he'd probably have gone over to the SDP, and maybe would have ended his life wincing and sniggering along with all the current outrages. Or maybe he'd have just keeled over after sucking in the pelf from various directories and consultancies. Instead, he used his generous pension and the proceeds from books he wrote himself to go round the place with a megaphone raising hell, or at least passionate applause among the earnest and herbivorous. This is at some level how we think a retired politician should behave. It's on the right side of the distinction between a politician in a democracy and a democratic politician. It's why he was generally popular and drew so many tributes from his political enemies. He lived a better life than they live, or intend to live. He saved them the trouble.

It helped that he could be right. I saw a clip of him on Channel 4 just now saying that as a minister he had tried hard to make capitalism work in a way that delivered economic justice, but came to realise that it could not, because it depended on injustice. And now here we have a government that is almost entirely based on the premise that expanding injustice is necessary for the benefit of capital and that, anyway, most people don't really deserve justice. It may be that people's sense of justice isn't particularly strong in matters unrelated to their own immediate interests. But we just lost someone who wanted to make it stronger and did his best to try and make that happen.

March 13, 2014

The International Campaign for Tibet has been harvesting Chinese social media for posts by Chinese tourists to illustrate the extent of China's military (or more strictly, paramilitary) occupation of Tibet and of Tibetan populated areas of China: there are lots of pictures and posts from Aba/Ngaba in Sichuan, the epicentre of the recent wave of self-immolations. Powerful stuff, especially as filtered through the naivete of the visiting Han. via CDT.